It is planned to return the functions of state inspector in Kazakhstan, primarily by increasing the number of employees of this organization. This was stated by Minister of Labor and Social Protection of the Population Birzhan Nurymbetov at the press conference in the Government.

“The number of the state labor inspectorate, which was transferred from the ministry to akimats in 2013, is constantly decreasing. And today only 260 labor inspectors work throughout the country, so the full coverage of enterprises is problematic,” said the minister.

As Nurymbetov noted, if about 9 thousand inspections are performed per year, then 90% of them are according to the applications of employees, scheduled inspections are practically minimized in accordance with the law.

“Moreover, today there are a lot of restrictions for state labor inspectors. He does not have the right to respond to any violations of labor law until he receives permission from the prosecutor’s office, notifies the employer in advance, and moreover, checking even on the application for non-payment of salaries. According to the law, he has the right to check the non-payment of the salary of only one specific person who submitted the application, and not the entire team,” the head of the department said.

For this, the ministry initiated their proposals.

“In international practice, the labor inspector has the right to freely visit any enterprise at any time of the day to eliminate violations of labor laws in relation to employees. We want to restore this status of the state labor inspector. Today, even in terms of number, we have one state inspector for 23 thousand employees, the ILO recommendation is one inspector for 10 thousand employees. At a minimum, for starters, we need to increase the number of inspectors by 2.5 times. And to introduce such a status so that they can always, at any time, freely have the opportunity to respond to violations of labor law,” he said.

However, the ministry believes that the inspector should not be given the right to immediately fine the business.

“He will have to write out an order on elimination of violations, set a deadline, and if the employer fails to comply with the order, only after that there should be administrative responsibility, which will exclude the possibility of a corruption,” the minister concluded.